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If no buyer emerges for Rackspace at an attractive price, the company still has a future as an IT services provider. But the days of a share price close to $80 and a perception that it’s in the same category as Amazon may not return.

On August 11, Rackspace reported mixed second quarter earnings, with revenue higher than expected at $441 million, a 17% increase from the previous year, but net income down 12% to $22 million. EBITDA margins were on the low end of management predictions at 32.1%. The company made no mention of the sale process it announced in May when it stated it had retained in response to M&A and partnership advances. On August 12, Rackspace’s share price dropped 5% from $31.31 per share to $29.50.

Analysts lack confidence that Rackspace will sell soon. Many companies that appeared to be logical buyers of cloud assets like Cisco and have downplayed the notion of acquiring anything as large or Rackspace, noted Lou Miscioscia, managing director at CLSA, in a note on Monday. ’s cloud chief and former CEO of SoftLayer Lance Crosby called the idea of acquiring Rackspace “not exciting,” according to VentureBeat. A month ago, I reported that Rackspace buyer interest was “tepid” for the news service Brightwire, although I got mixed messages about desire for it.

Nobody believes Rackspace needs to sell. It’s a viable company. It’s profitable and generating cash. It’s growing. But its share price is less than half what it was at its peak in early 2013. Rackspace has thrived or suffered due to comparisons with Amazon, Miscioscia said in an interview. When Rackspace announced it would support the cloud computing platform open stack two years ago, its shares benefited because investors thought it would achieve the kind of growth other infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) players like Amazon and were experiencing in the cloud. Rackspace also benefited because there weren’t many public investment opportunities in IaaS, said Miscioscia. Amazon, Microsoft and Google’s cloud businesses were units of larger companies, and Softlayer, now part of IBM, was private. Rackspace received the brunt of investor enthusiasm for IaaS.

More recently, though, Rackspace has suffered under Amazon comparisons, and seems a small, weak player at a time when large competitors are cutting fees.

But Rackspace is not a direct competitor to Amazon. Pat Walravens, managing director at JMP Securities, expressed the difference this way: If a business hosts a web site on Amazon and the site goes down for three days, Amazon can do nothing to help and the business loses three days of online orders. Rackspace sells IT services over web hosting, so it can say, “Okay, we’ll fix the problem. Have a good week.”

Unfortunately, Rackspace’s web hosting is more capital intensive than Amazon’s cloud. “Rackspace is less automated,” said Miscioscia. “It needs more staff.” Its growth is also slower. Miscioscia said better comparable companies to Rackspace are IT services providers like Accenture, and since that’s the case, its price is still high, even if investors want it to be higher.

I heard a month ago that if Rackspace sells, it wants a price of about $55 per share. That would mean a premium of more than 40%, probably too high for it to fetch from reticent buyers in the near-term. “If it were me, I wouldn’t sell on weakness,” said Walravens, who added that Rackspace’s tasks if it can’t sell are to execute well and control spending. “It’s easy to forget that a quarter ago, investors were worried that Rackspace couldn’t grow if Amazon was cutting prices by 40%. And it just showed that it can grow.”

Investors expect Rackspace to sell eventually because its competitors are much larger, said an industry source, but it would be difficult for Rackspace to achieve its price expectations if it sold soon.